Alexander Etkind has PhD in Psychology from Bekhterev Institute, Leningrad, and another in Slavonic Literatures from the University of Helsinki. Before coming to Cambridge, he taught at the European University at St. Petersburg, with which he continues to collaborate. He was a visiting professor at New York University and Georgetown University, and a resident fellow at Harvard, Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington D.C., Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Research interests are internal colonization in the Russian Empire, comparative studies of cultural memory, and the dynamics of the protest movement in Russia. In 2010-2013, he is directing the European research project, Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.

Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. Boulder - Oxford: Westview 1996 (translated by Noah and Maria Rubens). Published in Russian in 1993. Translated into French, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Serbian, Bulgarian.